Fiction: “Aurora”

Year 1

Aurora was back in the woods.

Things were muddled.

One minute she’d be singing towards a branch, the next, leaning over her bed, knees on the floor, crying into the sheets.

She remembered her parents. She remembered the fairies who raised her. She remembered the curse. She remembered thinking, Inevitable.

Sometimes she’d come upon the house in the woods, cloths still stuffed in a window’s crack. She’d knock and a woman with no face would answer. She’d knock and a mouse would answer. She’d knock and she would answer, like a mirror was there. She raised her hand to touch the glass and touched her own hand.

The house was filled with dust and then it wasn’t. Standing close to the fireplace’s mantle, the dust would appear again. She ran her finger along the mantle, and the dust clung to her in a little crescent shape.

Her fingertip began to itch and swell. Not an amount anyone could see. Only if she held her finger up beside a finger that was not swollen. She imagined her finger in someone’s mouth.

Then the dust on the mantle was gone again. It gleamed like it had been polished. No mark that Aurora had ever been there.

This was how she’d always inhabited the world.

The whole room blinked away. Then it came back. The mantle was higher this time—an inch from her face. She licked it.

How many days had it been? The year flew by.

Year 2

The details started to settle. The woods were filled with birds now. There were a few people even, and she fell in love with one of them.

They talked all night. Aurora took their secrets in like a sinkhole, like they’d brushed a surface that quickly and effortlessly fell away. Aurora’s life had been very plain in the woods. But not their life—their father wasn’t a good man and the stories were countless—what he threw, what he said. Once, No one’s going to love you like that.

After the talking, they kissed. They kissed for a long time. She’d heard that a kiss would wake her, but she prayed none of these did.

They touched each other’s bodies everywhere. They didn’t know what else to do. Or they had an idea, but they weren’t eager for it. They said they would love each other forever.

But then they stopped, of course. One first, and then the other out of spite.

Had they loved each other forever? she asked herself. Was this the end of forever?

She didn’t know how normal it was to be heartbroken, poor girl.

She cried more than she’d ever cried. She stopped eating (which wasn’t dangerous in the dream). She burned their things. She yelled at them when she came upon them in a clearing. Or, she ignored them perfectly, and they teared up until they had to excuse themselves. Yes, this was the year Aurora learned about love and her own cruelty.

Year 3

This year she had sex with the few people who were in the woods. All of them. Such was the dream.

Sleeping Aurora, in her tower, also orgasmed, as anyone’s body would.

Every time that dreaming Aurora got pregnant, she lost the pregnancy. Early.

She wondered why she could not stay pregnant in the dream. Was her imagination not great enough to create a child? Would it be wrong to imagine only herself again? To raise herself? What a good job she could do.

She wondered how time was passing outside the dream. Maybe it had been a matter of minutes, her parents still crying at her bedside and holding her hand. She tried to feel if anyone was holding her hand. She focused on it so hard that the hand of her sleeping self turned bright red at her side.

Year 4

This year Aurora became intent on time going its normal speed. She kept track of nights. She marked the passage of time on a piece of parchment that seemed stable enough. She kept it rolled up inside her dress.

She came across bodies of slugs. One day, they had dried up until their skin had thickened and dimpled and resembled fruit. The next day, that taut skin had split, and their insides had tumbled out of them, twice the size that their bodies had been.

On one, before it burst, an orange stripe had appeared—like looking into a flower, Aurora thought. Which was a bizarre thought, because she’d looked into dozens of flowers, and very few had orange stripes.

Some days she found the slugs’ bodies in a huge fit of mucus on the ground, as if their death had been a struggle. She stayed awake one night to search for them, to watch them and their violent deaths, but she never found them.

In the morning, a few trees away, there were the newly dead bodies.

Later, she’d be jealous of things that died in the dream, but in these first years, as the seasons changed, she forgot about the slugs.

Year 5

Aurora spent this whole year looking at her reflection, where she could find it, in rivers and lakes. Hours lying on banks, or on small, steep edges over creeks.

She would turn twenty-one this year, but nothing about her had changed.

If things had gone to plan, she would have had a child by now. Her breasts would have filled with milk. She would have stretch marks and wider feet. She would have received gifts for her child. Countless gifts. The carpenters in the kingdom would have fashioned elaborate cribs and rocking chairs and spinning tops.

She practiced saying the words of a twenty-one-year-old to her reflection. She practiced making requests of servants she did not have. She practiced reprimanding the child she did not have.

But she learned not to reprimand the imaginary child too much. If she did, she got carried away. More than a few times she had yelled at the imaginary child for hours, until she was sobbing, and her face was red, and she was breathless. If she fought for breath, it was because with each new breath, she could yell something new—some warning, some caution.

She was furious at how the child walked into danger. Invited it. How their own center of balance betrayed them. How they’d hit the back of their head against a stone floor.

And then, after the yelling, Aurora returned to her reflection, and there she was—her perfect, unaging face.

Year 6

This year she found the castle that she was from. She wandered up every staircase expecting a spinning wheel, and she sighed at each empty room.

She’d been in the castle for such a short time that she didn’t know who was missing. She only knew how large the castle felt. How large the kitchen. How large the stables. How large the gardens.

She found the cellar full of wine, and she drank for the first time in her life. She drank until she got sick. Her vomit got into her hair and onto her dress. She heated water for a bath. She washed herself. She washed her dress. She felt shaky for days. Women that looked like her mother kept approaching her with water and telling her to drink. Drink.

Year 7

Now she knew how to stop drinking before she got sick. She walked around most of this year half-drunk. She laughed at the worms in the ground. She laughed at the sky.

Horses had appeared in the stables and she rode them through the fields. The fields circled back on themselves in the dream, and often she saw the castle in the distance, waiting for her approach.

Year 8

There was a year where she tried to lose track of the year. What was time anyway? Nothing. Nothing, she said to herself in the dream. Nothing, her body muttered in the room.

She wondered if the room gathered dust. She wondered if she would wake to layers of dust piled high on her skin. Could she drag her nails down her arms until her skin was smooth again?

No. Her nails would not be her nails. Not like those in the dream.

But maybe the curse had stopped that growth, a gift-like part of her profound sleep, to not wake up in a nest of her own hair, nails curled like talons, skin that could be beaten out like a rug.

Year 9

Aurora imagined each type of monster that her body could be upon waking. And at those times, she forgot the type of monster that she already was. Her twenty-five-year-old mind in her perfect, sixteen-year-old body. If pubescent is perfect.

I’m twenty-five, she said out loud. She thought she was talking to herself.

But the trees responded. If you were alive, you would be perfectly formed.

She said, Am I not alive?

The trees said, If you were aging, you would be perfectly formed.

At twenty-five? she said.

Mmm, the trees said. Except your ears.

My ears? She put her hands up to her ears and felt the soft folds there.

Your ears are born as perfect as they can be, and then they die from there.

That can’t be right, she said, and the trees went back to how they whistled and hissed in the wind.

Year 10

This year she tried to focus on memories of her life before she turned sixteen. She thought that perhaps she could relive those years, if she focused hard enough. Perhaps she could switch from a vaguely pictured memory to one of vividness and clarity.

She thought about the day the flies appeared in her room, at the corner of the house, the house in the woods, the house with the fairies. The flies seemed to have no way in and no way out.

The fairies said an animal must have died near the house, under the house. They weren’t sure.

Aurora placed a candle in the corner one night and the flies gathered where the light landed. And then she swatted one. The rest startled and flew away, but then they returned, and it was Aurora’s turn again.

There were less of them the next night. Less the night after that. Less and less.

She knew enough about flies to know that the dead animal was used up now, used up for all the good it was worth.

Year 11

Aurora felt certain that life couldn’t come from nothing. But it hadn’t been proven. In fact, there were persuasive arguments in both directions.

People were caught between the truth and the unknown.

Before the dream, Aurora had known her body, how it moved through time, in sync with it. And then this. So what could she trust, really?

Year 12

It was easy to lose time while imagining her sleeping self in the tower.

She pictured the room with soft sheets, silk maybe.

She pictured many women helping her.

If she got cold, they pulled furs over her.

If she got hot, they pulled everything off and fanned her—little fans up and down her body, like they were blinking her in and out of the light.

She could spend an especially long time imagining how, in the hours after she’d first fallen asleep, she would have been undressed.

She pictured a woman’s fingers moving along the laces that were drawn together down her back.

She pictured another woman pulling straps off of her shoulders.

But the tenderness of her musings stopped there. Without Aurora’s help, a woman would have had to bend and pull her arms out of any straps. A woman would have had to push and shove her body out of the dress.

100 years? the women would have muttered to each other.

Aurora could almost hear them, how they would have cursed her body, how they would have apologized for cursing it.

One curse was enough. 

Sarah Blake is the author of two novels, Clean Air and Naamah, and three collections of poetry, In Springtime, Let’s Not Live on Earth, and Mr. West.